Russia Gives Ukrainian Filmmaker Oleg Sentsov a 20-Year Sentence

MOSCOW — A Russian military court sentenced a Ukrainian filmmaker, Oleg Sentsov, to 20 years in a prison camp on Tuesday after convicting him of terrorism in the Crimean Peninsula after its annexation by Russia last year.

The punishment was announced from the Northern Caucasus Military District Court in the southern Russian city of Rostov-on-Don, which hears terrorism cases. Mr. Sentsov, 39, was found guilty of creating a terrorist group, carrying out two terrorist acts and plotting another that involved blowing up a statue of Lenin in Crimea’s capital, Simferopol.

Mr. Sentsov, who lived in Simferopol, was active in protests against the pro-Kremlin government of Viktor F. Yanukovych, who was toppled as president of Ukraine in February 2014. Russia annexed Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula, home to the Russian Navy’s Black Sea fleet, shortly thereafter.

Other activists have described how the film director helped evacuate Ukrainian servicemen who were blockaded in Crimea after the Russian takeover.

Mr. Sentsov pleaded not guilty to all charges. Prosecutors accused him of creating a Crimean branch of Right Sector, a Ukrainian nationalist group that is banned in Russia — he denied it, and so did the group — and of setting fire to the offices of pro-Kremlin organizations in Crimea.

Aleksandr Kolchenko, an ecologist, was sentenced to 10 years as an accomplice.

Two other defendants had been given seven-year sentences in earlier rulings. One of them, Gennady Afanasyev, had been scheduled to testify against Mr. Sentsov last month, but retracted his testimony on July 31, saying he had given it under duress. Memorial, a Russian rights group, said last week that Mr. Afanasyev had been tortured.

After the presiding judge, Sergei Mikhailyuk, read out the sentence and asked Mr. Sentsov and Mr. Kolchenko if they understood, the two men, standing in a glass defendants’ cage, smiled and started singing Ukraine’s national anthem, a fixture of protests against Mr. Yanukovych.

The courtroom footage was shown on Ukrainian television and circulated on YouTube and the Facebook pages of Russian opposition activists and liberal intelligentsia.

President Petro O. Poroshenko of Ukraine expressed his support for Mr. Sentsov in a Twitter post.

“Hang on, Oleg,” he wrote. “The time will come and those who organized the judgment against you will themselves end up in the prisoners’ dock.”

Ukraine’s Foreign Ministry, in a statement on its website, called the trial “a judicial farce.”

Christoph Strasser, the German government’s special envoy for human rights and humanitarian affairs, said in a statement that he was “shaken” by the severity of the sentences, which he noted could be appealed, and urged Russia to comply with Council of Europe norms for the humane treatment of prisoners.

Dmitry Dinze, a lawyer for Mr. Sentsov, told journalists outside the courthouse that an appeal would be taken to Russia’s Supreme Court, the official Tass news agency reported.

“This is the height of injustice and lawlessness,” Mr. Dinze said, according to Tass. “The materials of the defense showed that Oleg Sentsov is essentially innocent.”

European filmmakers have spoken out in support of Mr. Sentsov, who is seen as a promising director. His film “Gamer,” about a computer-game-obsessed Ukrainian teenager, was shown at the International Film Festival Rotterdam in 2012.

Last week, several major Russian filmmakers expressed their support. In a letter published in Novaya Gazeta, Andrey Zvyagintsev, whose 2014 film “Leviathan,” about a standoff between a lone-wolf provincial auto mechanic and local authorities, was nominated for an Academy Award for best foreign language film, asked for leniency for Mr. Sentsov as a “talented cinematographer and father of young children.”

Mr. Zvyagintsev said that he had read all available materials about the case and could find no direct proof of Mr. Sentsov’s guilt.

In an unrelated but highly publicized case, a court in the Vladimir region near Moscow granted parole on Tuesday to Yevgenia Vasilyeva, a former Defense Ministry official who was recently sentenced to five years in prison on multimillion-dollar fraud charges.

Alison Smale contributed reporting from Berlin.

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A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A6 of the New York edition with the headline: Filmmaker From Ukraine Sent to Prison by Russians. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe